David Cambria

As Reese Arrowsmith, head of legal operations at Lincoln Financial Group, said in a discussion, “Lawyers still think of law as an art, not a science.” He implied that that was a bad thing. But like everything at work (and maybe in life), it's both.

If progress is humanity's ability to complicate simplicity, then innovation is its ability to turn complication into usable information and tools. Or to use one of the most tired phrases in the business space, to “do more with less.”

Now in its seventh year, it is the only survey dedicated to benchmarking the operations of legal departments in areas including staffing, technology, e-discovery, cost management, metrics/reporting, and relationships with outside counsel.

Predictive coding can be extremely useful and powerful in a discovery context by dramatically reducing the size of review sets. But the tools can be used in many other ways, and law departments would be wise to start considering them.

On the first day of InsideCounsel’s SuperConference, experts provided strategies for effectively deploying technology within legal departments, on a panel called “Using Technology To Enhance Law Department Management”